Sender One Opens Aliso Viejo Facility, Co-Owned by Preexisting Members

Roped climbing walls at Sender One Aliso Viejo — Earlier this month, the California gym chain Sender One opened its new location in Aliso Viejo, a city just east of Laguna Beach. The facility—which is co-owned alongside a group of Sender One gym members—offers both roped climbing and bouldering, in addition to fitness and yoga amenities. (All photos are of Sender One Aliso Viejo and are by Fred Pompermayer, courtesy of Sender One)

Sender One Aliso Viejo
Aliso Viejo, California

Specs: Sender One opened its first facility in 2013, a mixed-discipline climbing gym in Santa Ana, California, and has since opened five more facilities and a training center. The latest Sender One gym opened in Aliso Viejo on February 1^st, and the California gym chain has plans to open a new facility in Thousand Oaks in 2027. For the Aliso Viejo and Thousand Oaks gyms, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Wes Shih said the Sender One team raised funding differently than they had in the past. “Instead of bringing in outside capital (e.g., larger institutional investors like a private equity), we leaned into one of the qualities that makes climbing gyms special – community,” he stated. “We can’t disclose who our owners are, but we raised nearly all of the capital for Aliso Viejo from preexisting members of our gym community, most in and around the new location, and they are co-owners of Aliso Viejo along with Sender One.”

The Aliso Viejo gym is Sender One’s fourth full-service facility and offers a mix of roped climbing and bouldering walls. In addition to a Sender City—the chain’s interactive climbable center concept, where both kids and adults can climb modeled towers and buildings on autobelays—the Aliso Viejo location has 16,500 square feet of climbing wall surface on walls reaching 45 feet. The 23,000-square-foot facility is in the San Joaquin Hills of Southern Orange County, southeast of Los Angeles. Located in the Commons Shopping Center, Sender One Aliso Viejo is in proximity to coffee shops, marketplaces and restaurants. Shih said they chose this city for the project because Sender One’s original location is in nearby Santa Ana, and many climbers were driving from further away regions of Orange County to access a gym. “Some of them even stopped climbing once their lives changed, i.e., professional or family commitments, such that traveling from South Orange County to Santa Ana became too difficult for them,” he explained.

Climbers bouldering at the new Aliso Viejo gym — *“We aren’t really in a position to be too choosy given the reality of real estate in Southern California,” Shih said. “If something can work, we will make it work.”*

The Thousand Oaks location, which will be Sender One’s fifth full-service facility upon completion, is expected to open sometime in Q1 or Q2 of 2027. Northwest of Los Angeles, this city is one of the largest in Ventura County. The new gym will be constructed in Janns Marketplace, in proximity to the Oaks Mall and surrounding retail corridors, and is accessible from the 101 freeway. Co-tenants will include Gold’s Gym, Dave and Busters, and a Sky Zone. Like other full-service Sender One gyms, the Thousand Oaks location will have a Sender City as well as fitness and yoga offerings, but the specifics of the wall design and size are still in the works for the 23,000-square-foot-plus facility. Similar to the Aliso Viejo gym, Shih said the location was chosen because of the trek many climbers had to make to access other gyms. “We have long had members travel from over the Sepulveda Pass in the LA area (where I-5 and the 101 meet), who drove many times 1-2hrs to climb at our LAX location,” he explained. “They would really love to not have to drive that far to climb at a Sender One.”

The Sender City at Sender One Aliso Viejo — Shih said Sender One is “always on the lookout for opportunities in certain areas of Southern California, and when one pops out, you then do a lot of self-examination to see if you can make it work given everything else going on both internally and externally.”

Shih said that because the Sender One business is located “in one of the largest markets where real estate is challenging,” expansion is “as it was when we first started, often opportunistic and happenstance.” Sender One looks to expand “when one of our locations starts to feel really busy, or on the flip side, we hear about places that are underserved,” he added. “These days, i.e., under current macroeconomic challenges, which have been challenging, we’re trying to find buildings in areas that don’t require us to stray too far from what has worked well for us, to minimize the risks of expanding when it isn’t the easiest time to.”

Walls: Dreamwall
Flooring: Flashed
CRM Software: RGP
Website: www.senderoneclimbing.com/alisoviejo/
Instagram: @SenderOne_AlisoViejo

In Their Words: “Expansion, particularly the second and third locations, adds so much complexity to how your company needs to operate overall, and you need to prepare for that. It’s not really a 1-2-3; it’s more like 1-3-5 or 7 in terms of what it felt like scaling. After three locations, particularly if they are not too close to each other, the added complexity of each new location doesn’t have that big ramp up.” – Wes Shih, Sender One Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer